Wednesday, 26 June 2013

Blogtrottr began as a personal hobby a couple of years ago now, as I was unable to find an RSS to email service that did what I wanted - so I wrote one. It has grown spectacularly over the last 18 months, and while we'd love it to remain an entirely free service, the reality is that there are bills to pay and servers to feed. So the time has now come to transition it to a sustainable business model to allow us to continuously improve our unique offering - and importantly, whilst retaining the free service that has brought us to where we are. We've got many exciting features lined up, and this change will allow us to bring them to you in the future.

But we've got some new toys ready now...

Improvements to email layout on a wider range of readers and devices

SSL across the website

Super quick updates for non-PuSH capable feeds.

Customizable email templates.

Customizable feed titles.

Customizable sender names.

Send updates as attachments - either PDF, text, or HTML with embedded images.

And now I'm pleased to introduce our new subscription plan line up! All plans even come with a 1 month free trial, so you can take them out for a test drive before you commit.

The Free Plan

The free plan offers the same features and functionality as you're used to, with the exception that it will now be limited to 25 subscriptions. This means that for 98.5% of our users, absolutely nothing will change. For those remaining 1.5% of 'heavier' users, we believe the paid plans still offer excellent value.

The Lite Plan

Only €4.00 a month, up to 250 subscriptions.

Additional features:

Super quick updates for non-PuSH capable feeds.

Customizable email templates - have things laid out as you choose.

Customizable feed titles.

Customizable sender names - get emails sent from your choice of name.

Control over the item sort order in digests.

Send updates as attachments - either PDF, text, or HTML with embedded images - keep up with your favourite feeds offline, or in your e-reader.

The Full Plan

As above, but all you can eat for €7.00 a month - no subscription limits.

What will happen if I have more than 25 subscriptions?

Nothing will happen yet! But on the 1st of August, if you're still on the Free plan, we'll simply pause any excess until you have just 25 active subscriptions. If you choose to upgrade after that, you can simply re-enable any paused subscriptions.

Take a plan out for a spin, free for a whole month, and see what you think! Not only do you get to use this first round of features, but you'll be helping speed development of some really cool future functionality.

What's in the pipeline?

Customizable send times - bringing in the ability to choose a particular time of day your digests are sent.

Flexible schedules - we want to introduce arbitrary and longer reaching scheduling, so you could have digests sent every hour, every week, every month, or anything in-between.

Feed grouping and aggregating - we understand that some things are best managed in groups, so we want to add the capability to add, manage, and receive multiple feeds as one.

Subscription management API - some of you have expressed interest in an management API, and a few people have already been playing with a beta version. We'll finalise that, and make it available to any Full plan subscribers.